God, life changes faster than you think.
Amy Tan

I also thought of playing improvisational jazz and I did take lessons for a while. At first I tried to write fiction by making up things that were completely alien to my life.
Amy Tan

I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Amy Tan

I didn't fear failure. I expected failure.
Amy Tan

I have a writer's memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
Amy Tan

I learned to forgive myself, and that enabled me to forgive my mother as a person.
Amy Tan

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic.
Amy Tan

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
Amy Tan

I saw my mother in a different light. We all need to do that. You have to be displaced from what's comfortable and routine, and then you get to see things with fresh eyes, with new eyes.
Amy Tan

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.
Amy Tan


I think I've always been somebody, since the deaths of my father and brother, who was afraid to hope. So, I was more prepared for failure and for rejection than for success.
Amy Tan

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.
Amy Tan

I used to think that my mother got into arguments with people because they didn't understand her English, because she was Chinese.
Amy Tan

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.
Amy Tan

I was intelligent enough to make up my own mind. I not only had freedom of choice, I had freedom of expression.
Amy Tan

I would find myself laughing and wondering where these ideas came from. You can call it imagination, I suppose. But I was grateful for wherever they came from.
Amy Tan

I would still like to have that luxury, to be able to just sit and draw for hours and hours and hours. In a way, that's what I do as a writer.
Amy Tan

In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you.
Amy Tan

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
Amy Tan

It's both rebellion and conformity that attack you with success.
Amy Tan